The Japanese Corpse (33 page)

"A very beautiful woman," the commissaris said, and dangled his legs contentedly. "I hope we will see her again tonight."

"But of course," the daimyo said, and tapped the commissaris' hand softly. "And there are other events on the program. I myself will try to be worthy of your attention"—he laughed and his hand touched the commissaris' sleeve—"but that may be boring for you, so afterward we'll have Miss Ahboombah again. And there'll be something to eat of course. Perhaps we should have started with the meal, but I thought that if we were all plonked down at long tables and if Yuiko had to run up and down to translate and if we had to stare at each other all the time... No."

"No," the commissaris said.

"No, no, so first we watch Miss Ahboombah. I will have to balance the feeling that exists between you and me. I frightened you not so long ago. I am sorry about that now, I saw your fear and afterward I felt guilty, although I thought, while it happened, that I had won."

"In the temple garden," the commissaris said, and went on dangling his legs. Behind him the gurgling and beeping had softened and a sweetness had crept into the music and he allowed himself to be cradled in the song of the bass and the flowing lines of the trumpet.

"But you mustn't mind that adventure," the daimyo said. "I would have been frightened too, and the trick wasn't original. I read the recipe in a book about the silver foxes of the Rokko Mountains, seven witches who lived here once, long ago now, in seven huts built in a circle. The witches thought of the torture—to show a man his own dead face. Evil women and very powerful, well-trained necromancers. They meditated, for weeks on end, like the monks in Kyoto—the good monks, not the bad ones who steal from their own temples and deliver the goods to us, nicely wrapped in cotton cloth. And the witches only wanted power, not the insight of the Buddha. Yes."

"Are you a Buddhist?" the commissaris asked. He thought he had heard a note of reverence in the daimyo's voice.

"Would I be a Buddhist?" the daimyo said, and held his broad hands upside down in front of his chest. "
What
would I be? A good question. I have no answer. My mind is clouded by the countless thoughts with which I have identified myself and which have all left their traces, and it is said that the Buddha mind is empty, empty and pure, for emptiness is always pure."

He thought. Yuiko's eyes seemed glued to his thick fleshy lips. "But we have cleared our minds, you and I. Jin-gi, do you remember?"

"I remember," the commissaris said, "and I asked the hotel director if he knew the word. He wrote it down for me. Two characters. 'Jin' means 'two men' and 'gf 'justice.'"

The daimyo beamed. "You remembered the word, and you have even thought about it! But that's very good, much more than I might have hoped for. You are in a foreign country and you receive many impressions, words, ideas. All day they fall on you, like raindrops, and like raindrops they roll away down the protection of your mind and are sucked up by the ground. That's what happens to me in America and I thought the same would happen to you here. But you remembered the word, the word that I gave to you on Lake Biwa. An important word that only we, the yakusa, have penetrated and truly understood. The idea, like so many ideas in our country, originates in China, but we don't always know what we are supposed to do with the Chinese wisdom, so very often we just store it somewhere, in temples mostly."

The daimyo grinned and pushed his fist softly into the commissaris' chest.

"Yes," the commissaris said. "This Jin-gi, a rule of behavior, I thought, some sort of code."

"Yes. Two men—justice. Two ideas that together form a third, and the third idea says something about human relations. The old daimyo, the man who I replaced after I had gotten myself through the war and had been appointed to a series of functions in our organization, said that two men will only be able to really meet after they have learned to destroy their own desires. Every time I saw him he would discuss that particular subject. Rather step back than jump ahead at the cost of another person."

The commissaris raised a thin hand. "At the cost of another yakusa?"

"Yes," the daimyo said "another yakusa. And when, in the end, he decided that I understood, he didn't want me to bow to him anymore. He claimed that the Japanese custom of bowing has degenerated from a greeting to an acceptance of status." He turned toward the commissaris. "Do you follow me?"

"No," the commissaris said. "To bow is to greet, I thought."

"Yes, but who bows
first
? That's what matters. In Japan we always try to determine one's level of life. When two men meet, someone has to bow first. Not in Jin-gi, however." He folded his hands into a praying gesture. "You see, two separate hands become one new form. You can use us, you and me as an example too. If we had met at some official event we might have had trouble bowing. You are a powerful man in Holland, but Holland is a long way off and I have my strength here, so perhaps I am of more importance, should we meet here. If that should be true, you might be expected to bow first. But we could look at the problem from another angle. You are older than I am, and you are far more experienced; you are an exotic foreigner from the West, and I am Mr. Tanaka or Mr. Tamaki, one of a hundred million creatures pushing for space on these little islands. So now what do we do? Who bows first?"

"I will," the commissaris said, "if I can do you a favor that way."

"No bows," the daimyo said. "We forget bows. You had the opportunity to kill my old friend Kono, and your assistant could have left Yuiko in her bathroom, in her own vomit. But you forgot your own desires and stepped back and proved, in the eyes of every yakusa who is worthy of the name, that you had learned the lessons of your own organization in Holland and that you can practice your insight."

"Well..." the commissaris said.

"Jin-gi," the daimyo said, and stared into space. The trumpet had returned to the first note of the Monk song and the sustaining rhythm ended. Silence had returned to the hall. "Please excuse me," the daimyo said. "I have to go to the kitchen to see that the liquor you brought has been cooled properly. A rich royal liquor, but your assistant said that the taste gets lost when it isn't served very cold, so I asked the cook to place the bottles in his freezers, then we can drink the spirit later tonight. You brought a great quantity and you must have troubled yourselves considerably. It wasn't necessary; your presence is an important gift in itself."

Dorin took the daimyo's place on the edge of the stage and smiled nervously. "Miss Ahboombah is next on the program," he said softly. "What a spectacle, a black stripper in a Japanese castle. Our civilization is going ahead with leaps and bounds."

"You don't like black women?" the commissaris asked politely.

"Oh yes," Dorin said, and gestured vaguely. "I do. As a boy in San Francisco I was absolutely thrilled by them and my mother claims that I became quite impossible, even as a baby, whenever black ladies paid the slightest attention to me. I think that my first real excitement was caused by a girl from the Congo. I don't remember what she was doing in San Francisco, maybe she had come to some congress. She was dressed in a wide flowing African garment, very colorful, and she had her hair dyed gray and put it up into a sort of knot. I followed her about all day and I am always dreaming about her, even now, and it happened more than ten years ago."

"Sexual dreams?" the commissaris asked.

"Yes, of course, but maybe more than that. Sex, certainly, but without any pornography, elevated sex, something like that."

Dorin seemed confused. He was bending forward, almost falling off the stage and his otherwise so carefully brushed hair hung down into his eyes.

The three Chinese bartenders rushed from behind the screen and pushed the yakusa to the sides of the hall. They were gliding about on their velvet slippers and making exaggerated gestures. The yakusa allowed themselves to be pushed, grinning at the antics of the three pompous but elegant men in their brocade vests and wide trousers. The bartenders, as if they wanted to excuse themselves for their rude behavior, retreated to the screen while they held hands and did a kind of shuffle, bowing and bobbing their pigtails, gracefully following the rhythm of the music which had started up again.

A round dim moon glowed softly as the paper lanterns were switched off, one by one. Miss Ahboombah stood at the lake shore, and felt the water with a carefully extended foot. The soft light was reflected in a bleached cloth wrapped around her body. Only percussion and bass accompanied her slow dreamy movements. When she pulled a boat toward her, with small jerks on a long rope, the trumpet became audible too, whispered sounds spaced by dark lulls wherein the piano touched short double notes. The boat moved away from the shore again, powered by long paddle strokes. She stood in the rear of the boat, which glided over the swell of the lake's surface.

The commissaris sighed. There was no boat, no shore, no rope, no water; there was nothing but a floor made out of wide boards, a floor in a vast hall. But Miss Ahboombah had taken him to an African lake; there were palm trees on the shore, there would be a native village not far away, with round straw-topped huts. He saw how she looked up, following the flight of a bird, gliding about on large dark wings. He felt the slow heat of a tropical night. The bleached cloth fell off her as she dived; a long leap powered by the muscles of her legs and the resistance of the boat that glided on, empty and alone. He saw the slender body cut through heaving waves and circles formed by the splash of the leap. He saw her break through the surface and swim with stretched strokes, bending and pushing her hands through cool water. She turned and swam back to the boat and swung a glistening leg into the narrow hollowed-out tree trunk. She was squatting down and came up in a single movement, standing with the paddle back in her hand.

The light died in the paper moon, the music had gone with it, only the bass vibrated in the hall. When the paper lanterns came on again the hall was empty. The commissaris didn't want to break the silence. He heard the daimyo breathing quietly next to him and the trumpeter's leg rubbing against the side of the piano. But the applause came, hesitantly at first, then swelling till it filled the hall.

De Gier had stood in a corner, half hidden by the dragon screen. He had shaken his head unbelievingly when the dance began. He had expected a wild performance, a strip act stressed by heavy drumbeats and piercing trumpet bursts working up to some rough orgasm in which the saxophone would blare and sob and wheeze. A nightclub dancer, intent on holding her public enthralled, who will show all, while bits of garments whirl to the floor.

But de Gier had followed the woman too, on and in the lake, which had reminded him of his balcony, as the commissaris had been reminded of his garden. She had taken him to a protected spot, hidden deep under his thoughts, to the quiet glade that had to be at the end of the path which he sometimes followed in his dreams.

He pushed himself free from the wall and saw the commissaris wave, and he crossed the hall that began to fill up with yakusa, waiting for the bar to open.

"Good party, sir," he said. "Pity that the Snow Monkeys will smash it to smithereens in a minute. I suppose they can come any moment now, right?"

The small shape of the commissaris on the edge of the stage seemed as unreal as the rest of his entourage and his words formed themselves with difficulty. "Not yet," the commissaris said, and grabbed a glass from a passing tray. "We still have a few hours. I am glad that the ambassador remembered to send the jenever and that you were able to pick up the cases from the airport this morning."

"Forty-eight bottles of the very best," de Gier said. "If they get themselves stuck into that lot, it'll be a bit of a mess, sir."

The commissaris looked at the bar, which was disappearing behind the dragon screen again. "The daimyo is disciplining them pretty well up to now, sergeant, but I suppose he'll loosen up as the night moves on. You and I will have to join the merriment; let's see who can get the most drunk, you or I."

"You are serious, sir? That won't be difficult. The bar is loaded with whisky and brandy and our jenever will be poured on top of that."

"Yes," the commissaris said, and nodded. "Drunk, that's what we'll have to be, dead drunk, smashed, the worse the better."

"But shouldn't we be able to look about? You know what Dorin is planning. Maybe we should be on our feet by the time the helicopters come."

The commissaris pointed with his head. De Gier looked round and saw Dorin, finding his way slowly through the massed yakusa. "Don't worry, Rinus," the commissaris said softly. "Maybe they'll have to carry us out, but tomorrow we'll wake up as usual, with a bit of a hangover I imagine, but safe and sound."

"I was talking to Kono just now," Dorin said. "He took the bandage off his hand. The wound seems to be doing well."

"A nice man," the commissaris said.

"A darling," Dorin said, "just like all those other sweetie pies. Their pleasantness makes me sick to my stomach. They are doing it much too well tonight, I have to tell myself over and over again that they are the worst bastards you might ever want to avoid, because if I don't I forget, and I forget all the same, every time one of them comes over for a chat and a smile."